On 1/21/2016 11:04 AM, Nick Rogers wrote:
On Wed, Jan 20, 2016 at 2:01 PM, Matthew Grooms<mgro...@shrew.net> wrote:
All,
I have a curious problem with a lightly loaded pair of pf firewall running
on FreeBSD 10.2-RELEASE. I'm noticing TCP entries are disappearing from
the state table for no good reason that I can see. The entry limit is set
to 100000 and I never see the system go over about 70000 entries, so we
shouldn't be hitting the configured limit ...
In my experience if you hit the state limit, new connections/states are
dropped and existing states are unaffected.
Aha! You shook something out of the dusty depths of my slow brain :) I
believe that what you say is true as long as adaptive timeouts are
disabled, which by default they are not ...
Timeout values can be reduced adaptively as the number of
state ta-
ble entries grows.
adaptive.start
When the number of state entries exceeds this value,
adaptive
scaling begins. All timeout values are scaled
linearly with
factor (adaptive.end - number of states) / (adaptive.end -
adaptive.start).
adaptive.end
When reaching this number of state entries, all
timeout val-
ues become zero, effectively purging all state entries
imme-
diately. This value is used to define the scale
factor, it
should not actually be reached (set a lower state
limit, see
below).
Adaptive timeouts are enabled by default, with an adaptive.start
value equal to 60% of the state limit, and an adaptive.end value
equal to 120% of the state limit. They can be disabled by
setting
both adaptive.start and adaptive.end to 0.
# pfctl -sm
states hard limit 100000
src-nodes hard limit 100000
frags hard limit 50000
table-entries hard limit 200000
# pfctl -si
Status: Enabled for 78 days 14:24:18 Debug: Urgent
State Table Total Rate
current entries 67829
searches 113412118733 16700.2/s
inserts 386313496 56.9/s
removals 386245667 56.9/s
Counters
match 441731678 65.0/s
bad-offset 0 0.0/s
fragment 1090 0.0/s
short 220 0.0/s
normalize 761 0.0/s
memory 0 0.0/s
bad-timestamp 0 0.0/s
congestion 0 0.0/s
ip-option 4366487 0.6/s
proto-cksum 0 0.0/s
state-mismatch 50334 0.0/s
state-insert 10 0.0/s
state-limit 0 0.0/s
src-limit 0 0.0/s
synproxy 0 0.0/s
This problem is easy to reproduce by establishing an SSH connection to the
firewall itself, letting it sit for a while and then examining the state
table. After a connection is made, I can see the entry with an
established:established state ...
# pfctl -ss | grep X.X.X.X | grep 63446
all tcp Y.Y.Y.Y:22 <- X.X.X.X:63446 ESTABLISHED:ESTABLISHED
If I let the SSH session sit for a while and then try to type into the
terminal on the client end, the connection stalls and produces a network
error message. When I look at the pf state table again, the state entry for
the connection is no longer visible. However, the ssh process is still
running and I still see the TCP connection established in the output of
netstat ...
# netstat -na | grep 63446
tcp4 0 0 Y.Y.Y.Y.22 X.X.X.X.63446 ESTABLISHED
When I observe the packet flow in TCP dump when a connection stalls,
packets being sent from the client are visible on the physical interface
but are shown as blocked on the pflog0 interface.
Does this happen with non-SSH connections? It sounds like your SSH
client/server interaction is not performing a keep-alive frequently enough
to keep the PF state established. If no packets are sent over the
connection (state) for some time, then PF will timeout (remove) the state.
At this point your SSH client still believes it has a successful
connection, so it tries to send packets when you resume typing, but they
are blocked by your PF rules which likely specify "flags S/SA keep state",
either explicitly or implicitly (it is the filter rule default), which
means block packets that don't match an existing state or are not part of
the initial SYN handshake of the TCP connection.
It happened with UDP SIP and log running HTTP sessions that sit idle as
well. The SSH connection was just the easiest to test. Besides that, the
default TCP timeout value for established connections is quite high at
86400s. An established TCP connection should be able to sit for a full
day with no traffic before the related state table entry gets evicted.
Look at your settings in pf.conf for "timeout tcp.established", which
affects how long before an idle ESTABLISHED state will timeout. Also look
into ClientAliveInterval in sshd configuration, which I believe is 0
(disabled) by default, which means it will let the client timeout without
sending a keep-alive. If you don't want PF to force timeout an idle SSH
connection, then ideally ClientAliveInterval is less than or equal (i.e.,
more-frequent) to PF's tcp.established timeout value.
Thanks for the suggestion! I completely forgot about the adaptive
timeout options until I double checked the settings based on you reply
:) My values are set to default for TCP and extended a bit for UDP. The
adaptive.start value was calculated at 60k for the 100k state limit.
That in particular looked way too relevant to be a coincidence. After
increasing the value to 90k, my total state count started increasing and
leveled out around 75k. It's always hovered around 65k up until now, so
10k sate entries were being discarded on a regular basis ...
# pfctl -si
Status: Enabled for 0 days 02:25:41 Debug: Urgent
State Table Total Rate
current entries 77759
searches 483831701 55352.0/s
inserts 825821 94.5/s
removals 748060 85.6/s
Counters
match 27118754 3102.5/s
bad-offset 0 0.0/s
fragment 0 0.0/s
short 0 0.0/s
normalize 0 0.0/s
memory 0 0.0/s
bad-timestamp 0 0.0/s
congestion 0 0.0/s
ip-option 6655 0.8/s
proto-cksum 0 0.0/s
state-mismatch 0 0.0/s
state-insert 0 0.0/s
state-limit 0 0.0/s
src-limit 0 0.0/s
synproxy 0 0.0/s
# pfctl -st
tcp.first 120s
tcp.opening 30s
tcp.established 86400s
tcp.closing 900s
tcp.finwait 45s
tcp.closed 90s
tcp.tsdiff 30s
udp.first 600s
udp.single 600s
udp.multiple 900s
icmp.first 20s
icmp.error 10s
other.first 60s
other.single 30s
other.multiple 60s
frag 30s
interval 10s
adaptive.start 90000 states
adaptive.end 120000 states
src.track 0s
I think there may be a problem with the code that calculates adaptive
timeout values that is making it way too aggressive. If by default it's
supposed to decrease linearly between %60 and %120 of the state table
max, I shouldn't be loosing TCP connections that are only idle for a few
minutes when the sate table is < %70 full. Unfortunately that appears to
be the case. At most this should have decreased the 86400s timeout by
%17 to 72000s for established TCP connections.
I've tested this for a few hours now and all my idle SSH sessions have
been rock solid. If anyone else is scratching their head over a problem
like this, I would suggest disabling the adaptive timeout feature or
increasing it to a much higher value. Maybe one of the pf maintainers
can chime in and shed some light on why this is happening. If not, I'm
going to file a bug report as this certainly feels like one.
Thanks again,
-Matthew
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